EFE/14ymedio, Havana, 8 September 2021 — Cuba aspires to go back to having its usual school period from September to July, complete and in person for the 2023-2024 academic year, an official source said this Tuesday.
The Cuban Minister of Education, Ena Elsa Velázquez, reiterated in a press conference that this normality must be recovered as the vaccination of children and adolescents from 2 to 18 years of age progresses with their own formulas of the Cuban vaccines Abdala, Soberana 02 and Soberana Plus.
The notice had already been given by Velázquez last May, when she said: “We are going to have two atypical school years, with a shift in time resulting from covid-19. It is planned to resume the normal teaching calendar (September-July) for the course 2023/2024.”
The current 2020-2021 school period was resumed the day before throughout the country under the conditions of teleclasses and distance, after being interrupted in April 2020 when the first positive case of SARS-Cov-2 was confirmed.
Last fall, schools in the provinces least affected by the virus resumed face-to-face classes, but the latest outbreak at the end of last year marked the return to distance education throughout the country.
Velázquez affirmed yesterday that the upcoming 2021-2022 course is scheduled for the end of February or the beginning of March next year.
She explained that hygiene measures such as the use of a mask, social distancing and frequent hand washing will continue even while the vaccination campaign for the pediatric population is underway, which began on Friday and should end on November 15.
More than 70,000 children and adolescents have been infected in Cuba with the coronavirus since the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020, according to the island’s health authorities.
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